As a marketing lesson, as per the subject matter experts over at runrex. They boxed themselves in as far as the target audience was concerned. Microsoft also seemed to be targeting a very niche group of users when marketing the Zune, as is discussed over at runrex. The product seemed to be aimed at those people who were anti-mainstream and want to be different from the crowd, painting the picture that everyone had an iPod, and therefore by getting the Zune, you will stand out from the crowd.
This also handicapped them and contributed to their failure. They ended up missing the opportunity to market their product to a broader audience, which is a marketing lesson we should learn from them.
As mentioned above, the Zune was a great product in isolation, with one feature, in particular, standing out. This was a great and innovative feature and one that was ahead of its time. However, it was badly restricted by red tape in the music industry and restrictions by record companies. As covered over at runrex. As a marketing lesson, it shows the importance of learning the regulations and restrictions in your industry, otherwise, you risk having your great ideas go to waste.
Another marketing error that led to the failure of Microsoft Zune, one that Microsoft readily admit to, is that they were fixated on chasing and defeating Apple. As an important marketing tip, as per the gurus over at runrex. At the end of the day, one of the main reasons why the Zune failed was because it was perceived as an iPod knockoff. It is a perception they struggled to shrug off, and it is one of the reasons they product failed.
With the tagline "a thousand songs in your pocket", the historic launch of Apple's first generation iPod took the tech world by storm. Within five years, the company dominated the world of portable music players without any other big competitor in the market. In the meantime, longtime rival Microsoft took a laissez-faire approach to its portable music devices early on, leaving it up to third-party manufacturers — like Samsung, iRiver and Creative -— to use Windows software to create their own gadgets it goes without saying that none of these devices had any real footing in the market.
But by , while Apple quickly became known as an icon for its futuristic and trendy branding, challenger Microsoft teamed up with tech giant Toshiba to give the iPod a run for its money: enter Zune.
Technically speaking, Zune's first incarnation, the Zune 30, looked and worked much like an iPod save for the 'i' in front of it. One could store a library of songs on the device and click manually through selections. The first generation model even allowed users to stream music, sync songs over WiFi and even send music and photos to friends -— all features that Apple hadn't yet integrated into its products.
But many tech critics ripped the product initially, chastising the gadget for its bulky size and brown color. Woods owns multiple Zune-stamped traveling cases and boombox docks. Microsoft spent most of the s a few steps behind Apple. The rival company was perennially a little bit cooler, sleeker, and more tasteful than the endemic squareness of the Gates estate. Often, the Zune was considered the ultimate example of that failure.
The product was entirely functional, sure, but for reasons that remain difficult to articulate — the video game insignias, the oversized trackpad, their baffling bulkiness — it was also about a million times less chic than the iPod. That same inscrutable problem flags Bing, Cortana, the ill-fated Windows Phone, etc. But today, almost a decade after Microsoft terminated the brand, there is a small bastion of diehards who are still loving and listening to their Zunes.
Preserving the Zune legacy has just become another part of the hobby. And so, most of the posts on the subreddit radiate with a strong wistful ennui in lieu of any firmware updates on the horizon. Others administer modifications on their Zunes that push the hardware well past what it was capable of in ; like retrofitting an imaginary future where the Zune was not only still around but dominant. Someone else flaunts the wireless charging adapter they added to an ancient Zune One frequent contributor to the forum, year-old Erick Leach, reminds me that, in its heyday, the Zune came equipped with a fairly robust social media appendage: Zune owners could send songs to each other wirelessly and unlock Xbox Live-like achievements for the music they listened to — both novel features in the mids.
The brand never managed to muster the cultural ubiquity of the iPod Apple attempted its own failed social network, Ping, around the same time , but with that emphasis on community, perhaps it was inevitable for the Zune to eventually mount a cult-like fandom.
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